The author revisits the lost world of Bulletin Board Systems, and finds himself “strolling through a community frozen in time, Pompeii-style.” He finds discussions perfectly preserved, and in some cases maintained, since their heyday as an intimate precursor to the internet in the 1980s and 1990s.
John Lanchester reviews three books on social media, the war for attention, and Silicon Valley giants. His conclusion? “I am scared of Facebook”.
A poacher turned gamekeeper hacker acts as a guide to the clandestine world of the dark net, a home for all sorts of illegal trade.
A issue with the internet’s mechanism for identifying device locations led to millions of devices being incorrectly located in an American couple’s front garden. A funny glitch surely? Perhaps, until the FBI show up.
An investigation into Peter Thiel’s data mining company reveals the extent of the surveillance done by government and corporate clients using their technology.
A detailed look at the birth and early childhood of the personal computer. http://www.bit.ly/arstechnica-ibm
A searching piece about Amazon and monopoly, published in a newspaper owned by Amazon’s CEO. If you have the time, it’s also worth dipping into the elegantly wrought 28,000 word ‘note’ in The Yale Law Journal that inspired the piece.
Though it is currently the 7th most visited site in the world (and 4th in the US), it’s easy to underestimate the sheer scale of Reddit, the self-styled “front page of the internet”. That scale, and its anarchic traits, have made it the front line in figuring out what is acceptable online behaviour. This insightful and often darkly funny piece meets the people trying to draw the lines.